Within the rim, and other essays, 1914-15

WITHIN THE RIM

AND OTHER ESSAYS

WITHIN THE RIM

AND OTHER ESSAYS

1914-15

HENRY JAMES

LONDON: 48 PALL MALL

W. COLLINS SONS & CO. LTD.

GLASGOW MELBOURNE AUCKLAND

Copyright 1918

Within the Rim Written in Feb. 1915 for Miss E.
Asquith for a proposed album in aid of the Arts
Fund. The idea of the album was abandoned, and
the article was ultimately published in the Fort
nightly Review, Aug. 1917.

Refugees in Chelsea Published in the Times Literary
Supplement, March 23, 1916.

The American Volunteer Motor- Ambulance Corps in
France: A Letter to the Editor of an American
Journal Issued as a pamphlet, 1914.

France Published in The Book of France, edited by
Winifred Stephens, Macmillan, 1915.

The Long Wards Published in The Book of the Homeless,
edited by Edith Wharton, Macmillan, 1916.

Thanks are due in each case for the permission to
reprint these essays.

411613

CONTENTS

PAGE

WITHIN THE RIM Iz

REFUGEES IN CHELSEA .39

THE AMERICAN VOLUNTEER MOTOR-AMBULANCE

CORPS IN FRANCE : A Letter to the Editor of an
American Journal 5^

FRANCE g 3

THE LONG WARDS

WITHIN THE RIM

WITHIN THE RIM

THE first sense of it all to me after the first shock
and horror was that of a sudden leap back into
life of the violence with which the American Civil
War broke upon us, at the North, fifty-four years
ago, when I had a consciousness of youth which
perhaps equalled in vivacity my present conscious
ness of age. The illusion was complete, in its
immediate rush; everything quite exactly matched
in the two cases; the tension of the hours after
the flag of the Union had been fired upon in South
Carolina living again, with a tragic strangeness
of recurrence, in the interval during which the
fate of Belgium hung in the scales and the possi
bilities of that of France looked this country harder
in the face, one recognised, than any possibility,
even that of the England of the Armada, even
that of the long Napoleonic menace, could be

ii

;; \YKHtN THE RIM

imagined to have looked her. The analogy quickened
and deepened with every elapsing hour ; the drop
of the balance under the invasion of Belgium
reproduced with intensity the agitation of the New
England air by Mr Lincoln s call to arms, and I
went about for a short space as with the queer
secret locked in my breast of at least already
knowing how such occasions helped and what a
big war was going to mean. That this was literally
a light in the darkness, or that it materially helped
the prospect to be considered, is perhaps more
than I can say; but it at least added the strangest
of savours, an inexpressible romantic thrill, to the
harsh taste of the crisis : I found myself literally
knowing by experience what immensities, what
monstrosities, what revelations of what immeasur
abilities, our affair would carry in its bosom a
knowledge that flattered me by its hint of immunity
from illusion. The sudden new tang in the atmo
sphere, the flagrant difference, as one noted, in
the look of everything, especially in that of people s

faces, the expressions, the hushes, the clustered

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WITHIN THE RIM

groups, the detached wanderers and slow-paced
public meditators, were so many impressions long
before received and in which the stretch of more than
half a century had still left a sharpness. So I took
the case in and drew a vague comfort, I can scarce
say why, from recognition; so, while recognition
lasted, I found it come home to me that we, we
of the ancient day, had known, had tremendously
learnt, what the awful business is when it is long/
when it remains for months and months bitter and
arid, void even of any great honour. In consequence
of which, under the rapid rise of presumptions of
difficulty, to whatever effect of dismay or of ex
citement, my possession of something like a standard
of difficulty, and, as I might perhaps feel too, of
success, became in its way a private luxury.

My point is, however, that upon this luxury I
was allowed after all but ever so scantily to feed.
I am unable to say when exactly it was that the
rich analogy, the fine and sharp identity between
the faded and the vivid case broke down, with the
support obscurely derived from them; the moment

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anyhow came soon enough at which experience
felt the ground give way and that one swung off
into space, into history, into darkness, with every
lamp extinguished and every abyss gaping. It
ceased quite to matter for reassurance that the
victory of the North had been so delayed and yet
so complete, that our struggle had worn upon the
world of the time, and quite to exasperation, as
could well be remembered, by its length; if the
present complication should but begin to be as
long as it was broad no term of comparison borrowed
from the past would so much as begin to fit it.
I might have found it humiliating; in fact, however,
I found it of the most commanding interest, whether
at certain hours of dire apprehension or at certain
others of the finer probability, that the biggest
like convulsion our generations had known was
still but too clearly to be left far behind for exalta
tions and terrors, for effort and result, as a general
exhibition of the perversity of nations and of the
energy of man. Such at least was the turn the
comparison took at a given moment in a remembering

WITHIN THE RIM

mind that had been steeped, so far as its restricted
contact went, but in the Northern story; I did,
I confess, cling awhile to the fancy that what
loomed perhaps for England, what already did so
much more than loom for crucified Belgium, what
was let loose in a torrent upon indestructible
France, might correspond more or less with the
pressure of the old terrible time as the fighting
South had had to know it, and with the. grim con
ditions under which she had at last given way.
For the rest of the matter, as I say, the difference
of aspect produced by the difference of intensity
cut short very soon my vision of similitude. The
intensity swallowed up everything; the rate and
the scale and the speed, the unprecedented engines,
the vast incalculable connections, the immediate
presence, as it were, of France and Belgium, whom
one could hear pant, through the summer air, in
their effort and their alarm, these things, with the
prodigious might of the enemy added, made me
say, dropping into humility in a manner that
resembled not a little a drop into still greater

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WITHIN THE RIM

depths, Oh, no, that surely can t have been "a
patch " on this ! Which conclusion made accord
ingly for a new experience altogether, such as I
gratefully embrace here an occasion not to leave
unrecorded.

It was in the first place, after the strangest
fashion, a sense of the extraordinary way in which
the most benign conditions of light and air, of sky
and sea, the most beautiful English summer
conceivable, mixed themselves with all the violence
of action and passion, the other so hideous and
piteous, so heroic and tragic facts, and flouted
them as with the example of something far superior.
Never were desperate doings so blandly lighted
up as by the two unforgettable months that I was
to spend so much of in looking over from the old
rampart of a little high-perched Sussex town at the
bright blue streak of the Channel, within a mile
or two of us at its nearest point, the point to which
it had receded after washing our rock-base in its
earlier ages, and staring at the bright mystery

beyond the rim of the farthest opaline reach. Just

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WITHIN THE RIM

on the other side of that finest of horizon-lines
history was raging at a pitch new under the sun;
thinly masked by that shameless smile the Belgian
horror grew; the curve of the globe toward these
things was of the scantest, and yet the hither spaces
of the purest, the interval representing only charm
and calm and ease. One grew to feel that the
nearer elements, those of land and water and sky
at their loveliest, were making thus, day after day,
a particular prodigious point, insisting in their
manner on a sense and a wondrous story which
it would be the restless watcher s fault if he didn t
take in. Not that these were hints or arts against
which he was in the least degree proof; they
penetrated with every hour deeper into the soul,
and, the contemplations I speak of aiding, irresistibly
worked out an endless volume of references. It
was all somehow the history of the hour addressing
itself to the individual mind or to that in any
case of the person, at once so appalled and so
beguiled, of whose response to the whole appeal
I attempt this brief account. Round about him
W.R. 17 B

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stretched the scene of his fondest frequentation
as time had determined the habit; but it was as
if every reason and every sentiment conducing
to the connection had, under the shock of events,
entered into solution with every other, so that
the only thinkable approach to rest, that is to the
recovery of an inward order, would be in restoring
them each, or to as many as would serve the purpose,
some individual dignity and some form.

It came indeed largely of itself, my main help
to the reparatory, the re-identifying process; came
by this very chance that in the splendour of the
season there was no mistaking the case or the plea.
This, as you can see better than ever before/ the
elements kept conspiring to say, is the rare, the
sole, the exquisite England whose weight now
hangs in the balance, and your appreciation of
whose value, much as in the easy years you may
have taken it for granted, seems exposed to some
fresh and strange and strong determinant, some
thing that breaks in like a character of high colour

in a play. Nothing could have thrilled me more,

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I recognise, than the threat of this irruption or
than the dramatic pitch; yet a degree of pain
attached to the ploughed-up state it implied so
that, with an elderly dread of a waste of emotion,
I fear I almost pusillanimously asked myself why
a sentiment from so far back recorded as lively
should need to become any livelier, and in fact
should hesitate to beg off from the higher diapason.
I felt as the quiet dweller in a tenement so often
feels when the question of structural improvements
is thrust upon him; my house of the spirit, amid
everything about me, had become more and more
the inhabited, adjusted, familiar home, quite big
enough and sound enough for the spirit s uses
and with any intrinsic inconvenience corrected
only since by that principle s having cultivated
and formed, at whatever personal cost (since my
spirit was essentially a person), the right habits,
and so settled into the right attitude for practical,
for contented occupation. If, however, such was
my vulgar apprehension, as I put it, the case was
taken out of my hands by the fate that so often

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WITHIN THE RIM

deals with these accidents, and I found myself
before long building on additions and upper storys,
throwing out extensions and protrusions, indulging
even, all recklessly, in gables and pinnacles and
battlements things that had presently trans
formed the unpretending place into I scarce know
what to call it, a fortress of the faith, a palace of
the soul, an extravagant, bristling, flag-flying
structure which had quite as much to do with the
air as with the earth. And all this, when one
came to return upon it in a considering or curious
way, because to and fro one kept going on the old
rampart, the town look-out, to spend one s aching
wonder again and again on the bright sky-line
that at once held and mocked it. Just over that
line were unutterable things, massacre and ravage
and anguish, all but irresistible assault and cruelty,
bewilderment and heroism all but overwhelmed;
from the sense of which one had but to turn one s
head to take in something unspeakably different
and that yet produced, as by some extraordinary
paradox, a pang almost as sharp.

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WITHIN THE RIM

It was of course by the imagination that this
latter was quickened to an intensity thus akin to
pain but the imagination had doubtless at every
turn, without exception, more to say to one s
state of mind, and dealt more with the whole
unfolding scene, than any other contributive force.
Never in all my life, probably, had I been so glad
to have opened betimes an account with this
faculty and to be able to feel for the most part
something to my credit there; so vivid I mean
had to be one s prevision of the rate at which
drafts on that source would require cashing. All
of which is a manner of saying that in face of what
during those horrible days seemed exactly over
the way the old inviolate England, as to whom
the fact that she was inviolate, in every valid sense
of the term, had become, with long acquaintance,
so common and dull, suddenly shone in a light
never caught before and which was for the next
weeks, all the magnificence of August and Sep
tember, to reduce a thousand things to a sort of
merciless distinctness. It was not so much that

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they leaped forth, these things, under the particular
recognition, as that they multiplied without end
and abounded, always in some association at least
that caught the eye, all together overscoring the
image as a whole or causing the old accepted
synthesis to bristle with accents. The image as a
whole, thus richly made up of them or of the
numberless testifying touches to the effect that
we were not there on our sea defence as the other,
the harried, countries were behind such bulwarks
as they could throw up was the central fact of
consciousness and the one to which every impression
and every apprehension more or less promptly
related themselves; it made of itself the company
in which for the time the mind most naturally
and yet most importunately lived. One walked
of course in the shade of the ambiguous contrast
ambiguous because of the dark question of
whether it was the liabilities of Belgium and France,
to say nothing of their awful actualities, that made
England s state so rare, or England s state that
showed her tragic sisters for doubly outraged;

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the action of the matter was at least that of one s
feeling in one s hand and weighing it there with
the last tenderness, for fullest value, the golden
key that unlocked every compartment of the
English character.

Clearly this general mystery or mixture was to
be laid open under stress of fortune as never yet
the unprecedentedness was above all what came
over us again and again, armaments unknown to
human experience looming all the while larger
and larger; but whatever face or succession of
faces the genius of the race should most turn up
the main mark of them all would be in the difference
that, taken together, couldn t fail to keep them
more unlike the peoples off there beyond than any
pair even of the most approved of these peoples
are unlike each other. Insularity ! one had
spent no small part of one s past time in mocking
or in otherwise fingering the sense out of that word;
yet here it was in the air wherever one looked and
as stuffed with meaning as if nothing had ever
worn away from it, as if its full force on the contrary

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amounted to inward congestion. What the term
essentially signified was in the oddest way a question
at once enormous and irrelevant; what it might
show as signifying, what it was in the circumstances
actively and most probably going to, seemed rather
the true consideration, indicated with all the weight
of the evidence scattered about. Just the fixed
look of England under the August sky, what was
this but the most vivid exhibition of character
conceivable and the face turned up, to repeat my
expression, with a frankness that really left no
further inquiry to be made? That appearance
was of the exempt state, the record of the long
safe centuries, in its happiest form, and even if
any shade of happiness at such an hour might well
seem a sign of profanity or perversity. To that
there were all sorts of things to say, I could at
once reflect, however; wouldn t it be the thing
supremely in character that England should look
most complacently herself, irradiating all her
reasons for it, at the very crisis of the question of
the true toughness, in other words the further

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duration, of her identity? I might observe, as
for that matter I repeatedly and unspeakably did
while the two months lasted, that she was pouring
forth this identity, as atmosphere and aspect and
picture, in the very measure and to the very top
of her consciousness of how it hung in the balance.
Thus one arrived, through the succession of shining
days, at the finest sense of the case the interesting
truth that her consciously not being as her tragic
sisters were in the great particular was virtually
just her genius, and that the very straightest thing
she could do would naturally be not to flinch at
the dark hour from any profession of her genius.
Looking myself more askance at the dark hour
(politically speaking I mean) than I after my fashion
figured her as doing in her mass, I found it of an
extreme, of quite an endless fascination to trace
as many as possible of her felt idiosyncrasies back
to her settled sea-confidence, and to see this now
in turn account for so many other things, the
smallest as well as the biggest, that, to give the
fewest hints of illustration, the mere spread of the

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great trees, the mere gathers in the little bluey-
white curtains of the cottage windows, the mere
curl of the tinted smoke from the old chimneys
matching that note, became a sort of exquisite
evidence.

Exquisite evidence of a like general class, it
was true, didn t on the other side of the Channel
prevent the awful liability to the reach of attack
its having borne fruit and been corrected or
averted again was in fact what half the foreign
picture meant; but the foreign genius was the
other, other at almost every point; it had always
in the past and on the spot, one remembered,
expressed things, confessed things, with a difference,
and part of that difference was of course the differ
ence of history: the fact of exemption, as I have
called it, the fact that a blest inviolacy was almost
exactly what had least flourished. France and
Belgium, to refer only to them, became dear
accordingly, in the light I speak of, because, having
suffered and suffered, they were suffering yet again,

while precisely the opposite process worked for

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the scene directly beneath my eyes. England
was interesting, to put it mildly which is but a
shy evasion of putting it passionately because
she hadn t suffered, because there were passages
of that sort she had publicly declined and defied;
at the same time that one wouldn t have the case
so simple as to set it down wholly to her luck.
France and Belgium, for the past, confessed, to
repeat my term; while England, so consistently
harmonised, with all her long unbrokenness thick
and rich upon her, seemed never to do that, nor
to need it, in order to practise on a certain fine
critical, not to mention a certain fine prejudiced,
sensibility. It was the season of sensibility now,
at any rate for just those days and just that poor
place of yearning, of merely yearning, vigil; and
I may add with all emphasis that never had I had
occasion so to learn how far sensibility may go
when once well wound up. It was saying little
to say I did justice easiest at once and promptest
to the most advertised proposal of the enemy,
his rank intention of clapping down the spiked helmet,

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than which no form of headgear, by the way,
had ever struck one as of a more graceless, a more
tell-tale platitude, upon the priceless genius of
France; far from new, after all, was that measure
of the final death in him of the saving sense of
proportion which only gross dementia can abolish.
Those of my generation who could remember the
detected and frustrated purpose of a renewed
Germanic pounce upon the country which, all but
bled to death in 1871, had become capable within
five years of the most penetrating irony of revival
ever recorded, were well aware of how in that at
once sinister and grotesque connection they had
felt notified in time. It was the extension of the
programme and its still more prodigious publication
during the quarter of a century of interval, it was
the announced application of the extinguisher to
the quite other, the really so contrasted genius
the expression of which surrounded me in the
manner I have glanced at, it was the extraordinary
fact of a declared non-sufferance any longer, on

Germany s part, of either of the obnoxious national

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WITHIN THE RIM

forms disfiguring her westward horizon, and even
though by her own allowance they had nothing
intellectually or socially in common save that
they were objectionable and, as an incident, crush-
able it was this, I say, that gave one furiously
to think, or rather, while one thanked one s stars
for the luxury, furiously and all but unutterably
to feel.

The beauty and the interest, the now more than
ever copious and welcome expression, of the aspects
nearest me found their value in their being so
resistingly, just to that very degree of eccentricity,
with that very density of home-grownness, what
they were; in the same way as the character of the
sister-land lately joined in sisterhood showed for
exquisite because so ingrained and incorrigible,
so beautifully all her own and inimitable on other
ground. If it would have been hard really to give
the measure of one s dismay at the awful proposition
of a world squeezed together in the huge Prussian
fist and with the variety and spontaneity of its

parts oozing in a steady trickle, like the sacred

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blood of sacrifice, between those hideous knuckly
fingers, so, none the less, every reason with which
our preference for a better condition and a nobler
fate could possibly bristle kept battering at my
heart, kept, in fact, pushing into it, after the
fashion of a crowd of the alarmed faithful at the
door of a church. The effect was literally, yes,
as of the occasion of some great religious service,
with prostrations and exaltations, the light of a
thousand candles and the sound of soaring choirs
all of which figured one s individual inward
state as determined by the menace. One could
still note at the same time, however, that this high
pitch of private emotion was by itself far from
meeting the case as the enemy presented it; what
I wanted, of course, to do was to meet it with the
last lucidity, the fullest support for particular
defensive pleas or claims and this even if what
most underlay all such without exception came
back to my actual vision, that and no more, of the
general sense of the land. The vision was fed,
and fed to such a tune that in the quest for reasons

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that is, for the particulars of one s affection,
the more detailed the better the blades of grass,
the outlines of leaves, the drift of clouds, the streaks
of mortar between old bricks, not to speak of the
call of child-voices muffled in the comforting air,
became, as I have noted, with a hundred other like
touches, casually felt, extraordinary admonitions
and symbols, close links of a tangible chain. When
once the question fairly hung there of the possibility,
more showily set forth than it had up to then
presumed to be, of a world without use for the
tradition so embodied, an order substituting for
this, by an unmannerly thrust, quite another and
really, it would seem, quite a ridiculous, a crudely
and clumsily improvised story, we might all have
resembled together a group of children at their
nurse s knee disconcerted by some tale that it
isn t their habit to hear. We loved the old tale,
or at least I did, exactly because I knew it; which
leaves me keen to make the point, none the less,
that my appreciation of the case for world- variety
found the deeply and blessedly familiar perfectly

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consistent with it. This came of what I read into
the familiar; and of what I did so read, of what
I kept reading through that uplifted time, these
remarks were to have attempted a record that has
reached its limit sooner than I had hoped.

I was not then to the manner born, but my
apprehension of what it was on the part of others
to be so had been confirmed and enriched by the
long years, and I gave myself up to the general,
the native image I thus circled around as to the
dearest and most precious of all native images.
That verily became at the crisis an occupation
sublime; which was not, after all, so much an
earnest study or fond arrangement of the mixed
aspects as a positive, a fairly sensual bask in their
light, too kindled and too rich not to pour out by
its own force. The strength and the copious play
of the appearances acting in this collective fashion
carried everything before them; no dark dis
crimination, no stiff little reserve that one might
ever have made, stood up in the diffused day for a
moment. It was in the opposite way, the most

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opposite possible, that one s intelligence worked,
all along the line; so that with the warmth of the
mere sensation that they* were about as good,
above all when it came to the stress, as could well
be expected of people, there was the acute interest
of the successive points at which one recognised
why. This last, the satisfaction of the deepened
intelligence, turned, I may frankly say, to a pro
longed revel they* being the people about me
and every comfort I had ever had of them smiling
its individual smile straight at me and conducing
to an effect of candour that is beyond any close
notation. They didn t know how good they were,
and their candour had a peculiar lovability of
unconsciousness; one had more imagination at
their service in this cause than they had in almost
any cause of their own; it was wonderful, it was
beautiful, it was inscrutable, that they could make
one feel this and yet not feel with it that it at all
practically diminished them. Of course, if a shade
should come on occasion to fall across the picture,

that shade would perhaps be the question whether
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the most restless of the faculties mightn t on the
whole too much fail them. It beautified life, I
duly remembered, it promoted art, it inspired
faith, it crowned conversation, but hadn t it
always again under stress still finer applications
than these, and mightn t it in a word, taking the
right direction, peculiarly conduce to virtue?
Wouldn t it, indeed, be indispensable to virtue of
the highest strain? Never mind, at any rate so
my emotion replied; with it or without it we seemed
to be taking the right direction; moreover, the
next best thing to the imagination people may
have, if they can, is the quantity of it they may
set going in others, and which, imperfectly aware,
they are just exposed to from such others, and
must make the best of : their advantage becoming
simply that it works, for the connection, all in their
favour. That of the associated outsider, the order
of whose feelings, for the occasion, I have doubtless
not given a wholly lucid sketch of, cultivated its
opportunity week after week at such a rate that,
technical alien as he was, the privilege of the great

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partaking, of shared instincts and ideals, of a
communion of race and tongue, temper and tra
dition, put on before all the blest appearances a
splendour to which I hoped that so long as I might
yet live my eyes would never grow dim. And the
great intensity, the melting together of the spiritual
sources so loosed in a really intoxicating draught,
was when I shifted my watch from near east to
far west and caught the enemy, who seemed
ubiquitous, in the long-observed effort that most
fastened on him the insolence of his dream and
the depth of his delusion. There in the west were
those of my own fond fellowship, the other, the
ready and rallying partakers, and it was on the
treasure of our whole unquenchable association
that in the riot of his ignorance this at least
apparently armour-proof he had laid his unholy
hands.

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REFUGEES IN CHELSEA

REFUGEES IN CHELSEA

THIS is not a Report on our so interesting and
inspiring Chelsea work, since November last, in
aid of the Belgians driven thither from their country
by a violence of unprovoked invasion and ravage
more appalling than has ever before overtaken a
peaceful and industrious people; it is the simple
statement of a neighbour and an observer deeply
affected by the most tragic exhibition of national
and civil prosperity and felicity suddenly subjected
to bewildering outrage that it would have been
possible to conceive. The case, as the generous
American communities have shown they well
understand, has had no analogue in the experience
of our modern generations, no matter how far
back we go; it has been recognised, in surpassing
practical ways, as virtually the greatest public
horror of our age, or of all the preceding; arrtl

39

REFUGEES IN CHELSEA

one gratefully feels, in presence of so much done
in direct mitigation of it, that its appeal to the
pity and the indignation of the civilised world
anticipated and transcended from the first all
superfluity of argument. We live into that is,
we learn to cultivate possibilities of sympathy
and reaches of beneficence very much as the
stricken and suffering themselves live into their
dreadful history and explore and reveal its extent;
and this admirable truth it is that unceasingly
pleads with the intelligent, the fortunate, and
the exempt, not to consent in advance to any dull
limitation of the helpful idea. The American
people have surely a genius, of the most eminent
kind, for withholding any such consent and de
spising all such limits; and there is doubtless no
remarked connection in which they have so shown
the sympathetic imagination in free and fearless
activity that is, in high originality as under
the suggestion of the tragedy of Belgium.

I have small warrant perhaps to say that atmo
spheres are communicable; but I can testify at

4 o

REFUGEES IN CHELSEA

least that they are breathable on the spot, to
whatever effect of depression or of cheer; and I
should go far, I feel, were I to attempt to register
the full bitter-sweet taste, by our Chelsea water
side, all these months, of the refugee element in
our vital medium. (The sweet, as I strain a point
perhaps to call it, inheres, to whatever distinguish-
ability, in our hope of having really done something,
verily done much; the bitter ineradicably seasons
the consciousness, hopes and demonstrations and
fond presumptions and all.) I need go no further,
none the less, than the makeshift provisional gates
of Crosby Hall, marvellous monument transplanted
a few years since from the Bishopsgate quarter of
the City to a part of the ancient suburban site of
the garden of Sir Thomas More, and now serving
with extraordinary beneficence as the most splen
did of shelters for the homeless. This great private
structure, though of the grandest civic character,
dating from the fifteenth century, and one of the
noblest relics of the past that London could show,
was held a few years back so to cumber the precious

41

REFUGEES IN CHELSEA

acre or more on which it stood that it was taken
to pieces in the candid commercial interest and
in order that the site it had so long sanctified
should be converted to such uses as would stuff out
still further the ideal number of private pockets.
Dismay and disgust were unable to save it; the
most that could be done was to gather in with
tenderness of care its innumerable constituent
parts and convey them into safer conditions,
where a sad defeated piety has been able to re-
edify them into some semblance of the original
majesty. Strange withal some of the turns of the
whirligig of time; the priceless structure came
down to the sound of lamentation, not to say of
execration, and of the gnashing of teeth, and went
up again before cold and disbelieving, quite de
spairing, eyes; in spite of which history appears
to have decided once more to cherish it and give
a new consecration. It is, in truth, still magnificent;
it lives again for our gratitude in its noblest par
ticulars; and the almost incomparable roof has
arched all this winter and spring over a scene

42

REFUGEES IN CHELSEA

probably more interesting and certainly more
pathetic than any that have ever drawn down its
ancient far-off blessing.

The place has formed, then, the headquarters
of the Chelsea circle of hospitality to the exiled,
the broken, and the bewildered; and if I may
speak of having taken home the lesson of their
state and the sense of their story, it is by meeting
them in the finest club conditions conceivable
that I have been able to do so. Hither, month
after month and day after day, the unfortunates
have flocked, each afternoon; and here the com
paratively exempt, almost ashamed of their exemp
tion in presence of so much woe, have made them
welcome to every form of succour and reassurance.
Certain afternoons each week have worn the
character of the huge comprehensive tea-party,
a fresh well-wisher discharging the social and
financial cost of the fresh occasion which has
always festally profited, in addition, by the extra
ordinary command of musical accomplishment,
the high standard of execution, that is the mark

43

REFUGEES IN CHELSEA

of the Belgian people. This exhibition of our
splendid local -resource has rested, of course, on a
multitude of other resources, still local, but of a
more intimate hospitality, little by little worked
out and applied, and into the details of which I
may not here pretend to go beyond noting that
they have been accountable for the large housed
and fed and clothed and generally protected and
administered numbers, all provided for in Chelsea
and its outer fringe, on which our scheme of
sociability at Crosby Hall itself has up to now
been able to draw. To have seen this scheme so
long in operation has been to find it suggest many
reflections, all of the most poignant and moving
order; the foremost of which has, perhaps, had
for its subject that never before can the wanton
hand of history have descended upon a group of
communities less expectant of public violence
from without or less prepared for it and attuned
to it.

The bewildered and amazed passivity of the
Flemish civil population, the state as of people

REFUGEES IN CHELSEA

surprised by sudden ruffians, murderers, and
thieves in the dead of night and hurled out, terrified
and half clad, snatching at the few scant house
hold gods nearest at hand, into a darkness mitigated
but by flaring incendiary torches this has been
the experience stamped on our scores and scores
of thousands, whose testimony to suffering, dismay,
and despoilment silence alone, the silence of vain
uncontributive wonderment, has for the most
part been able to express. Never was such a
revelation of a deeply domestic, a rootedly domi
ciled and instinctively and separately clustered
people, a mass of communities for which the sight
of the home violated, the objects helping to form
it profaned, and the cohesive family, the Belgian
ideal of the constituted life, dismembered, disem
bowelled, and shattered, had so supremely to
represent the crack of doom and the end of every
thing. There have been days and days when under
this particular impression the mere aspect and
manner of our serried recipients of relief, something
vague and inarticulate as in persons who have

45

REFUGEES IN CHELSEA

given up everything but patience and are living,
from hour to hour, but in the immediate and the
unexplained, has put on such a pathos as to make
the heart sick. One has had just to translate
any seated row of figures, thankful for warmth
and light and covering, for sustenance and human
words and human looks, into terms that would
exemplify some like exiled and huddled and charity-
fed predicament for our superior selves, to feel our
exposure to such a fate, our submission to it,
our holding in the least together under it, darkly
unthinkable. Dim imaginations would at such
moments interpose, a confused theory that even
at the worst our adventurous habits, our imperial
traditions, our general defiance of the superstition
of domesticity, would dash from our lips the cup
of bitterness; from these it was at all events im
possible not to come back to the consciousness
that almost every creature there collected was
indebted to our good offices for the means to come
at all. I thought of our parents and children,

our brothers and sisters, aligned in borrowed

4 6

REFUGEES IN CHELSEA

garments and settled to an as yet undetermined
future of eleemosynary tea and buns, and I ask
myself, doubtless to little purpose, either what
grace of resignation or what clamour of protest
we should, beneath the same star, be noted as
substituting for the inveterate Belgian decency.

I can only profess at once that the sense of this
last round about one was, at certain hours when
the music and the chant of consolation rose in
the stillness from our improvised stage at the end
of the great hall, a thing to cloud with tears any
pair of eyes lifted to our sublime saved roof in
thanks for its vast comprehension. Questions of
exhibited type, questions as to a range of form
and tradition, a measure of sensibility and activity,
not our own, dwindled and died before the gross
fact of our having here an example of such a world-
tragedy as we supposed Europe had outlived, and
that nothing at all therefore mattered but that we
should bravely and handsomely hold up our quite
heavy enough end of it. It is because we have
responded in this degree to the call unprecedented

47

REFUGEES IN CHELSEA

that we are, in common with a vast number
of organisations scattered through these islands,
qualified to claim that no small part of the in
spiration to our enormous act of welcome resides
in the moral interest it yields. One can indeed
be certain of such a source of profit but in the
degree in which one has found oneself personally
drawing upon it; yet it is obvious that we are
not treated every day to the disclosure of a national
character, a national temperament and type, con
fined for the time to their plainest and stoutest
features and set, on a prodigious scale, in all the
relief that the strongest alien air and alien conditions
can give them. Great salience, in such a case,
do all collective idiosyncrasies acquire upon the
fullest enumeration of which, however, as the
Belgian instance and the British atmosphere
combine to represent them, I may not now embark,
prepossessed wholly as I am with the more generally
significant social stamp and human aspect so
revealed, and with the quality derived from these

things by the multiplied examples that help us

4 8

REFUGEES IN CHELSEA

to take them in. This feeling that our visitors
illustrate above all the close and comfortable
household life, with every implication of a seated
and saturated practice of it, practice of the intimate
and private and personal, the securely sensual
and genial arts that flow from it, has been by itself
the key to a plenitude of observation and in
particular to as much friendly searching insight
as one could desire to enjoy.

The moving, the lacerating thing is the fashion
after which such a reading of the native elements,
once adopted, has been as a light flaring into
every obscurest retreat, as well as upon any puzzling
ambiguity, of the state of shock of the national
character under the infamy of the outrage put
upon it. That they, of all people the most given
over to local and patriarchal beatitude among
the admirable and the cherished objects handed
down to them by their so interesting history on
every spot where its action has been thickest
that is, on every inch, so to speak, of their teeming
territory should find themselves identified with
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REFUGEES IN CHELSEA

the most shamelessly cynical public act of which
the civilised world at this hour retains the memory,
is a fact truly representing the exquisite in the
horrible; so peculiarly addressed has been their
fate to the desecration of ideals that had fairty
become breath of their lungs and flesh of their
flesh. Oh, the installed and ensconced, the im-
memorially edified and arranged, the thoroughly
furnished and provided and nourished people !
not in the least besotted or relaxed in their security
and density, like the self-smothered society of
the ancient world upon which the earlier Huns
and Vandals poured down, but candidly complacent
and admirably intelligent in their care for their
living tradition, and only so off their guard as to
have consciously set the example of this care to
all such as had once smoked with them their
wondrous pipe of peace. Almost any posture of
stupefaction would have been conceivable in the
shaken victims of this delusion : I can speak best,
however, but of what I have already glanced at,
that temperamental weight of their fall which

50

REFUGEES IN CHELSEA

has again and again, at sight of many of them
gathered together, made the considering heart
as heavy for them as if it, too, had for the time
been worsted.

However, it would take me far to tell of half
the penetrating admonitions, whether of the dazed
or of the roused appearance, that have for so long
almost in like degree made our attention ache.
I think of particular faces, in the whole connection,
when I want most to remember since to remember
always, and never, never to forget, is a prescription
shining before us like a possible light of dawn
faces saying such things in their silence, or in their
speech of quite different matters, as to make the
only thinkable comment or response some word
or some gesture of reprieve to dumb or to dis
simulated anguish. Blest be the power that has
given to civilised men the appreciation of the face
such an immeasurable sphere of exercise for it
has this monstrous trial of the peoples come to
supply. Such histories, such a record of moral
experience, of emotion convulsively suppressed,

REFUGEES IN CHELSEA

as one meets in some of them : and this even if,
on the whole, one has been able to think of these
special allies, all sustainingly, much rather as the
sturdiest than as the most demonstrative of
sufferers. I have in these rapid remarks to reduce
my many impressions to the fewest, but must
even thus spare one of them for commemoration
of the admirable cast of working countenance we
are rewarded by the sight of, wherever we turn
amid the quantity of helpful service and all the
fruitful industries that we have been able to start
and that keep themselves going. These are the
lights in the picture; and who indeed would wish
that the lights themselves should be anything less
than tragic? The strong young man (no young
men are familiarly stronger,) mutilated, amputated,
dismembered in penalty for their defence of their
soil against the horde, and now engaged at Crosby
Hall in the making of handloom socks, to whom
I pay an occasional visit much more for my own
cheer, I apprehend, than for theirs express so
in their honest concentration under difficulties

52

REFUGEES IN CHELSEA

the actual and general value of their people that
just to be in their presence is a blest renewal of
faith. Excellent, exemplary, is this manly, homely,
handy type, grave in its somewhat strained atten
tion, but at once lighted to the briefest, sincerest
humour of protest by any direct reference to the
general cruelty of its misfortune. Anything but
unsuggestive, the range of the quiet physiognomy,
when one feels the consciousness behind it not to
have run thin. Thick and strong is the good
Flemish sense of life and all its functions which
fact is responsible for no empty and really un-
modelled mug/

I am afraid at the same time that, if the various
ways of being bad are beyond our reckoning, the
condition and the action of exemplary goodness
tend rather to reduce to a certain rich unity of
appearance those marked by them, however dis
sociated from each other such persons may have
been by race and education. Otherwise what
tribute shouldn t I be moved to pay to the gentle
man of Flanders to whom the specially improvised

53

REFUGEES IN CHELSEA

craftsmen I have just mentioned owe their training
and their inspiration? through his having, in his
proscribed and denuded state, mastered the craft
in order to recruit them to it, and, in fine, so far
as my observation has been concerned, exhibit
clear human virtue, courage and patience and
the humility of sought fellowship in privation,
with an unconscious beauty that I should be
ashamed in this connection not to have noted
publicly. I scarce know what such a personality
as his suggests to me if not that we had all, on our
good Chelsea ground, best take up and cherish as
directly and intimately as possible every scrap of
our community with our gentleman of Flanders.
I make such a point as this, at the same time,
only to remember how, almost wherever I have
tried sustainingly to turn, my imagination and
my intelligence have been quickened, and to
recognise in particular, for that matter, that this
couldn t possibly be more the case for them than
in visiting a certain hostel in one of our compara
tively contracted but amply decent local squares

54

REFUGEES IN CHELSEA

riverside Chelsea having, of course, its own
urban identity in the multitudinous County of
London : which, in itself as happy an example,
doubtless, of the hostel smoothly working as one
need cite, placed me in grateful relation with a
lady, one of the victims of her country s convulsion
and in charge of the establishment I allude to,
whom simply to meet/ as we say, is to learn how
singular a dignity, how clear a distinction, may
shine in active fortitude and economic self-efface
ment under an all but crushing catastrophe. Talk

about faces ! I could but privately ejaculate

as I gathered the sense of all that this one repre
sented in the way of natural nobleness and sweetness,
a whole past acquaintance with letters and art
and taste, insisting on their present restrictedness
to bare sisterly service.

The proud rigour of association with pressing
service alone, with absolutely nothing else, the
bare commodious house, so otherwise known to
me of old and now like most of our hostels, if I
am not mistaken, the most unconditioned of loans

55

REFUGEES IN CHELSEA

from its relinquishing owner the lingering look
of ancient peace in the precincts, an element I had
already, as I passed and repassed at the afternoon
hour, found somehow not at all dispelled by the
presence in the central green garden itself of sundry
maimed and hobbling and smiling convalescents
from an extemporised small hospital close at hand,
their battered khaki replaced by a like uniformity
of the loose light blue, and friendly talk with them
through the rails of their enclosure as blest to one
participant at least as friendly talk with them
always and everywhere is : such were the hovering
elements of an impression in which the mind had
yet mainly to yield to that haunting force on the
part of our waiting ^roscrigts which never consents
to be long denied. The proof of which universally
recognised power of their spell amid us is indeed
that they have led me so far with a whole side of
my plea for them still unspoken. This, however,
I hope on another occasion to come back to; and
I am caught meanwhile by my memory of how

the note of this conviction was struck for me, with

56

REFUGEES IN CHELSEA

extraordinary force, many months ago and in the
first flush of recognition of what the fate that had
overtaken our earliest tides of arrival and appeal
really meant meant so that all fuller acquaintance,
since pursued, has but piled one congruous reality
after another upon the horror.

It was in September, in a tiny Sussex town
which I had not quitted since the outbreak of
the war, and where the advent of our first handful
of fugitives before the warning of Louvain and
Aerschoot and Termonde and Dinant had just
been announced. Our small hill-top city, covering
the steep sides of the compact pedestal crowned
by its great church, had reserved a refuge at its
highest point; and we had waited all day, from
occasional train to train, for the moment at which
we should attest our hospitality. It came at last,
but late in the evening, when a vague outside
rumour called me to my doorstep, where the un
forgettable impression at once assaulted me. Up
the precipitous little street that led from the
station, over the old grass-grown cobbles where

57

REFUGEES IN CHELSEA

vehicles rarely pass, came the panting procession
of the homeless and their comforting, their almost
clinging entertainers, who seemed to hurry them
on as in a sort of overflow of expression of the
fever of charity. It was swift and eager, in the
autumn darkness and under the flare of a single
lamp with no vociferation and, but for a woman s
voice, scarce a sound save the shuffle of mounting
feet and the thick-drawn breath of emotion. The
note I except, however, was that of a young mother
carrying her small child and surrounded by those
who bore her on and on, almost lifting her as they
went together. The resonance through our im
memorial old street of her sobbing and sobbing
cry was the voice itself of history; it brought
home to me more things than I could then quite
take the measure of, and these just because it
expressed for her not direct anguish, but the in
credibility, as who should say, of honest assured
protection. Months have elapsed, and from having
been then one of a few hundred she is now one of
scores and scores of thousands : yet her cry is

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REFUGEES IN CHELSEA

still in my ears, whether to speak most of what
she had lately or of what she actually felt; and it
plays, to my own sense, as a great fitful, tragic
light over the dark exposure of her people.

THE AMERICAN VOLUNTEER

MOTOR-AMBULANCE CORPS

IN FRANCE

THE AMERICAN VOLUNTEER

MOTOR-AMBULANCE CORPS

IN FRANCE

A Letter to the Editor of an American Journal

SIR, Several of us Americans in London are so
interested in the excellent work of this body, lately
organised by Mr Richard Norton and now in active
operation at the rear of a considerable part of the
longest line of battle known to history, that I
have undertaken to express to you our common
conviction that our countrymen at home will
share our interest and respond to such particulars
as we are by this time able to give. The idea of
the admirable enterprise was suggested to Mr
Norton when, early in the course of the War, he
saw at the American Hospital at Neuilly scores
of cases of French and British wounded whose
lives were lost, or who must incur life-

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THE AMERICAN VOLUNTEER

long disability and suffering, through the long
delay of their removal from the field of battle.
To help energetically to remedy this dire fact
struck him at once as possible, and his application
of energy was so immediate and effective that in
just three weeks after his return to London to
take the work in hand he had been joined by a
number of his countrymen and of others possessed
of cars, who had offered them as ambulances
already fitted or easily convertible, and had not
less promptly offered themselves as capable chauf
feurs. To this promptly gathered equipment,
the recruiting of which no red tape had hampered
and no postponement to committee-meetings had
delayed, were at once added certain other cars
of purchase these made possible by funds rapidly
received from many known and unknown friends
in America. The fleet so collected amounted to
some fifteen cars. To the service of the British
Red Cross and that of the St John Ambulance it
then addressed itself, gratefully welcomed, and en
joying from that moment the valuable association

6 4

MOTOR-AMBULANCE CORPS

of Colonel A. J. Barry of the British Army,
who was already employed in part on behalf of
the Red Cross. I have within a few days had the
opportunity to learn from this zealous and accom
plished coadjutor, as well as from Mr Norton
himself, some of the particulars of their compre
hensive activity, they each having been able to
dash over to London for a visit of the briefest
duration. It has thus been brought home to me
how much the success of the good work depends
on American generosity both in the personal and
the pecuniary way exercised, that is, by the
contribution of cars, to which personal service,
that of their contributors, attaches itself, and of
course by such gifts of money as shall make the
Corps more and more worthy of its function and
of the American name.

Its function is primarily that of gathering in
the wounded, and those disabled by illness (though
the question is almost always of the former,) from
the posies de secours and the field hospitals, the

various nearest points to the Front, bestrewn
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THE AMERICAN VOLUNTEER

with patient victims, to which a motor-car can
workably penetrate, and conveying them to the
base hospitals, and when necessary the railway
stations, from which they may be further directed
upon places of care, centres of those possibilities
of recovery which the splendid recent extension
of surgical and medical science causes more and
more to preponderate. The great and blessed
fact is that conditions of recovery are largely secured
by the promptitude and celerity that motor-
transport offers, as compared with railway services
at the mercy of constant interruption and arrest,
in the case of bad and already neglected wounds,
those aggravated by exposure and delay, the long
lying on the poisonous field before the blest regi
mental brancardiers or stretcher-bearers, waiting
for the shelter of night, but full also of their own
strain of pluck, can come and remove them. Carried
mostly by rude arts, a mercy much hindered at the
best, to the shelter, often hastily improvised, at
which first aid becomes possible for them, they

are there, as immediately and tenderly as possible,

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MOTOR-AMBULANCE CORPS

stowed in our waiting or arriving cars, each of
which receives as large a number as may be con
sistent with the particular suffering state of the
stricken individual. Some of these are able to
sit, at whatever cost from the inevitable shake
over rough country roads; for others the lying
posture only is thinkable, and the ideal car is the
one which may humanely accommodate three
men outstretched and four or five seated. Three
outstretched is sometimes a tight fit, but when
this is impossible the gain in poor blesses assis is
the greater wedged together though broken
shoulder or smashed arm may have to be with a
like shrinking and shuddering neighbour. The
moral of these rigours is of course that the more
numerous the rescuing vehicles the less inevitable
the sore crowding. I find it difficult to express to
you the sense of practical human pity, as well as
the image of general helpful energy, applied in
innumerable chance ways, that we get from the
report of what the Corps has done, and holds itself

in readiness to do, thanks to the admirable spirit

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THE AMERICAN VOLUNTEER

of devotion without stint, of really passionate
work, animating its individual members. These
have been found beneficently and inexhaustibly
active, it is interesting to be able to note, in
proportion as they possess the general educated
intelligence, the cultivated tradition of tact, and
I may perhaps be allowed to confess that, for
myself, I find a positive added beauty in the fact
that the unpaid chauffeur, the wise amateur driver
and ready lifter, helper, healer, and, so far as may
be, consoler, is apt to be a University man and
acquainted with other pursuits. One gets the sense
that the labour, with its multiplied incidents and
opportunities, is just unlimitedly inspiring to the
keen spirit or the sympathetic soul, the recruit with
energies and resources on hand that plead with him
for the beauty of the vivid and palpable social result
Not the least of the good offices open to our
helpers are the odds and ends of aid determined
by wayside encounters in a ravaged country,
where distracted women and children flee from

threatened or invaded villages, to be taken up, to

68

MOTOR-AMBULANCE CORPS

be given the invaluable lift, if possible, in all the
incoherence of their alarm and misery; sometimes
with the elder men mixed in the tragic procession,
tragi-comic even, very nearly, when the domestic
or household objects they have snatched up in
their headlong exodus, and are solemnly encumbered
with, bear the oddest misproportion to the gravity
of the case. They are hurried in, if the car be
happily free, and carried on to comparative safety,
but with the admirable cleverness and courage of
the Frenchwoman of whatever class essentially
in evidence in whatever contact; never more so,
for instance, than when a rude field hospital has
had of a sudden to be knocked together in the
poor schoolhouse of a village, and the mangled and
lacerated, brought into it on stretchers or on
any rough handcart or trundled barrow that has
been impressed into the service, have found the
villageoises, bereft of their men, full of the bravest
instinctive alertness, not wincing at sights of
horror fit to try even trained sensibilities, handling
shattered remnants of humanity with an art as

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THE AMERICAN VOLUNTEER

extemporised as the refuge itself, and having each
precarious charge ready for the expert transfer
by the time the car has hurried up. Emphasised
enough by the ceaseless thunder of the Front the
quality of the French and the British resistance
and the pitch of their spirit; but one feels what
is meant none the less when one hears the variety
of heroism and the brightness of devotion in the
women over all the region of battle described from
observation as unsurpassable. Do we take too
much for granted in imagining that this offered
intimacy of appreciation of such finest aspects
of the admirable immortal France, and of a relation
with them almost as illuminating to ourselves
as beneficent to them, may itself rank as something
of an appeal where the seeds of response to her
magnificent struggle in the eye of our free longings
and liberal impulses already exist?

I should mention that a particular great Army
Corps, on the arrival of our first cars on the scene,
appealed to them for all the service they could

render, and that to this Corps they have been as

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MOTOR-AMBULANCE CORPS

yet uninterruptedly attached, on the condition
of a reserve of freedom to respond at once to any
British invitation to a transfer of activity. Such
an assurance had already been given the Com
missioner for the British Red Cross, on the part
of Mr Norton and Colonel Barry, with their arrival
at Boulogne, where that body cordially welcomed
them, and whence in fact, on its request, a four-
stretcher-car, with its American owner and another
of our Volunteers in charge, proceeded to work
for a fortnight, night and day, along the firing
line on the Belgian frontier. Otherwise we have
continuously enjoyed, in large, denned limits,
up to the present writing, an association with one
of the most tremendously engaged French Armies.
The length of its line alone, were I to state it here
in kilometres, would give some measure of the
prodigious fighting stretch across what is practically
the whole breadth of France, and it is in relation
to a fraction of the former Front that we have
worked. Very quickly, I may mention, we found
one of our liveliest opportunities, Mr Norton and

THE AMERICAN VOLUNTEER

Colonel Barry proceeding together to ascertain
what had become of one of the field hospitals
known to have served in a small assaulted town
a few days before, when, during a bombardment,
Colonel Barry had saved many lives. Just as our
Volunteers arrived a fresh bombardment began,
and though assured by the fleeing inhabitants,
including the mayor of the place, who was perhaps
a trifle over-responsibly in advance of them, that
there were no wounded left behind as in fact
proved to be the case we nevertheless pushed
on for full assurance. There w r ere then no wounded
to bring out, but it was our first happy chance of
bearing away all the hopeless and helpless women
and children we could carry. This was a less
complicated matter, however, than that of one
of Colonel Barry s particular reminiscences, an
occasion when the Germans were advancing on a
small place that it was clear they would take, and
when pressing news came to him of 400 wounded
in it, who were to be got out if humanly possible.
They were got out and motored away though

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MOTOR-AMBULANCE CORPS

it took the rescuing party thus three days, in the
face of their difficulties and dangers, to effect the
blest clearance. It may be imagined how precious
in such conditions the power of the chauffeur-
driven vehicle becomes, though indeed I believe
the more special moral of this transaction, as
given, was in the happy fact that the squad had
blessedly been able to bring and keep with it four
doctors, whose immediate service on the spot and
during transport was the means of saving very
many lives. The moral of that in turn would
seem to be that the very ideal for the general
case is the not so inconceivable volunteer who
should be an ardent and gallant and not otherwise
too much preoccupied young doctor with the
possession of a car and the ability to drive it, above
all the ability to offer it, as his crowning attribute.
Perhaps I sketch in such terms a slightly fantastic
figure, but there is so much of strenuous suggestion,
which withal manages at the same time to be
romantic, in the information before me, that it
simply multiplies, for the hopeful mind, the

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THE AMERICAN VOLUNTEER

possibilities and felicities of equipped good- will. An
association of the grimmest reality clings at the
same time, I am obliged to add, to the record of
success I have just cited the very last word of
which seems to have been that in one of the houses
of the little distracted town were two French
Sisters of Mercy who were in charge of an old
bedridden lady and whom, with the object of their
care, every effort was made in vain to remove.
They absolutely declined all such interference
with the fate God had appointed them to meet
as nuns if it was His will to make them martyrs.
The curtain drops upon what became of them,
but they too illustrate in their way the range of
the Frenchwoman s power to face the situation.
Still another form of high usefulness comes to
our Corps, I should finally mention, in its oppor
tunities for tracing the whereabouts and recovering
the identity of the dead, the English dead, named
in those grim lists, supplied to them by the military
authorities, which their intercourse with the people
in a given area where fighting has occurred enables

74

MOTOR-AMBULANCE CORPS

them often blessedly to clear up. Their pervasive
ness, their ubiquity, keeps them in touch with
the people, witnesses of what happens on the
battle-swept area when, after the storm has moved
on, certain of the lifeless sweepings are gathered
up. Old villagers, searched out and questioned,
testify and give a clue through which the where
abouts of the committal to thin earth of the last
mortality of this, that, or the other of the obscurely
fallen comes as a kind of irony of relief to those
waiting in suspense. This uncertainty had attached
itself for weeks to the fate in particular of many
of the men concerned in the already so historic
retreat of the Allies from Mons ground still
considerably in the hands of the Germans, but
also gradually accessible and where, as quickly
as it becomes so, Colonel Barry pushes out into
it in search of information. Sternly touching are
such notes of general indication, information from
the Cure, the village carpenter, the grave-digger of the
place, a man called so-and-so and a gentleman called
something else, as to the burial of forty-five dead

75

THE AMERICAN VOLUNTEER

English in the public cemetery of such and such
a small locality, as to the interment somewhere
else of an Englishman believed to be an officer/
as to a hundred English surprised in a certain
church and killed all but forty, and buried, as is
not always their fortune for their kindred, without
removal of their discs of identification. Among
such like data we move when not among those of
a more immediate violence, and all to be in their
way scarce less considerately handled. Mixed
with such gleanings one comes upon other matters
of testimony of which one hopes equal note is
made testimony as to ferocities perpetrated upon
the civil population which I may not here specify.
Every form of assistance and inquiry takes place
of course in conditions of some danger, thanks
to the risk of stray bullets and shells, not in
frequently met when cars operate, as they neither
avoid doing nor wastefully seek to do, in proximity
to the lines. The Germans, moreover, are noted as
taking the view that the insignia of the Red Cross,

with the implication of the precarious freight it

76

MOTOR-AMBULANCE CORPS

covers, are in all circumstances a good mark for
their shots; a view characteristic of their belligerent
system at large, but not more deterrent for the
ministers of the adversary in this connection than
in any other, when the admirable end is in question.
I have doubtless said enough, however, in illus
tration of the interest attaching to all this service,
a service in which not one of the forces of social
energy and devotion, not one of the true social
qualities, sympathy, ingenuity, tact, and taste,
fail to come into play. Such an exercise of them,
as all the incidental possibilities are taken advantage
of, represents for us all, who are happily not en
gaged in the huge destructive work, the play not
simply of a reparatory or consolatory, but a posi
tively productive and creative virtue in which
there is a peculiar honour. We Americans are as
little neutrals as possible where any aptitude for
any action, of whatever kind, that affirms life
and freshly and inventively exemplifies it, instead
of overwhelming and undermining it, is concerned.
Great is the chance, in fact, for exhibiting this as

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THE AMERICAN VOLUNTEER

our entirely elastic, our supremely characteristic,
social aptitude. We cannot do so cheaply, indeed,
any more than the opposite course is found, under
whatever fatuity of presumption, inexpensive and
ready-made. What I therefore invite all those
whom this notice may reach to understand, as
for that matter they easily will, is that the expenses
of our enlightened enterprise have to be continuously
met, and that if it has confidence in such support
it may go on in all the alert pride and pity that
need be desired. I am assured that the only criti
cism the members of the Corps make of it is that
they wish more of their friends would come and
support it either personally or financially or,
best of all, of course, both. At the moment I write
I learn this invocation to have been met to the
extent of Mr Norton s having within two or three
days annexed five fresh cars, with their owners
to work them and all, as I hear it put with elation,
excellent University men. As an extremely helpful
factor on the part of Volunteers is some facility
in French and the goodwill to stay on for whatever

MOTOR-AMBULANCE CORPS

reasonable length of time, I assume the excellence
of these gentlemen to include those signal merits.
Most members of the Staff of thirty-four in all (as the
number till lately at least has stood) have been glad to
pay their own living expenses; but it is taken for
granted that in cases where individuals are unable
to meet that outlay indefinitely the subscribers
to the Fund will not grudge its undertaking to
find any valuable man in food and lodging. Such
charges amount at the outside to i dollar 75 per
day. The expenses of petrol and tyres are paid
by the French Government or the British Red
Cross, so that the contributor of the car is at costs
only for the maintenance of his chauffeur, if he
brings one, or for necessary repairs. Mr Eliot
Norton, of 2 Rector Street, New York, is our
recipient of donations on your side of the sea, Mr
George F. Read, Hon. Treas., care of Messrs Brown,
Shipley & Co., 123 Pall Mall, S.W., kindly performs
this office in London, and I am faithfully yours,

HENRY JAMES.

LONDON, November 25, 1914.
79

FRANCE

FRANCE

I THINK that if there is a general ground in the
world, on which an appeal might be made, in a
civilised circle, with a sense of its being uttered
only to meet at once and beyond the need of in
sistence a certain supreme recognition and response,
the idea of what France and the French mean to
the educated spirit of man would be the nameable
thing. It would be the cause uniting us most
quickly in an act of glad intelligence, uniting us
with the least need of any wondering why. We
should understand and answer together just by
the magic of the mention, the touch of the two or
three words, and this in proportion to our feeling
ourselves social and communicating creatures
to the point, in fact, of a sort of shame at any
imputation of our not liberally understanding, of
our waiting in any degree to be nudged or hustled.

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FRANCE

The case of France, as one may hold it, where the
perceptive social mind is concerned and set in
motion, is thus only to be called exquisite so
far as we don t seem so to qualify things down.
We certainly all feel, in the beautiful connection,
in two general ways; one of these being that the
spring pressed with such happy effect lifts the
sense by its mere vibration into the lightest and
brightest air in which, taking our world all round,
it is given to our finer interest about things to breathe
and move; and the other being that just having
our intelligence, our experience at its freest and
bravest, taken for granted, is a compliment to us,
as not purely instinctive persons, which we should
miss, if it were not paid, rather to the degree of
finding the omission an insult.

Such, as I say, is our easy relation to the sound
of a voice raised, even however allusively and
casually, on behalf of that great national and
social presence which has always most oppositely,
most sensibly, most obsessively, as I surely may

put it, and above all most dazzingly, neighboured

8 4

FRANCE

and admonished us here : after such a fashion
as really to have made the felt breath of its life,
across an interval constantly narrowing, a part
of our education as distinguished from our luck.
Our luck in all our past has been enormous, the
greatest luck on the whole, assuredly, that any race
has ever had; but it has never been a conscious
reaction or a gathered fruition, as one may say;
it has just been a singular felicity of position and
of temperament, and this felicity has made us
observe and perceive and reflect much less than
it has made us directly act and profit and enjoy :
enjoy of course by attending tremendously to
all the business involved in our position. So far
as we have had reactions, therefore, they have
not sprung, when they have been at all intensified,
from the extraordinary good fortune of our state.
Unless indeed I may put it that what they have
very considerably sprung from has been exactly
a part of our general prodigy the good fortune
itself of our being neighboured by a native genius
so different from our own, so suggestive of wondrous

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FRANCE

and attaching comparisons, as to keep us chroni
cally aware of the difference and the contrast and
yet all the while help us to see into them and
through them.

We were not, to all appearance, appointed by
fate for the most perceptive and penetrative offices
conceivable; so that to have over against us and
within range a proposition, as we nowadays say,
that could only grow more and more vivid, more
and more engaging and inspiring, in the measure
of our growth of criticism and curiosity, or, in other
words, of the capacity just to pay attention, pay
attention otherwise than by either sticking very
fast at home or inquiring of the Antipodes, the
Antipodes almost exclusively what has that
practically been for us but one of the very choicest
phases of our luck aforesaid, one of the most
appraisable of our felicities? the very one, doubt
less, that our dissimilarity of temperament and
taste would have most contradictiously and most
correctively prescribed from the moment we were

not to be left simply to stew in our juice ! If the

86

FRANCE

advantage I so characterise was to be in its own
way thoroughly affirmative, there was yet nothing
about it to do real or injurious violence to that
abysmal good nature which sometimes strikes me as
our most effective contribution to human history.
The vision of France, at any rate, so close and so
clear at propitious hours, was to grow happily
illustrational for us as nothing else in any like
relation to us could possibly have become. Other
families have a way, on good opportunity, of
interesting us more than our own, and here was this
immense acquaintance extraordinarily mattering
for us and at the same time not irritating us by a
single claim of cousinship or a single liberty taken
on any such score. Any liberties taken were much
rather liberties, I think, of ours always abounding
as we did in quite free, and perhaps slightly rough,
and on the whole rather superficial, movement
beyond our island circle and toward whatever lay
in our path. France lay very much in our path,
our path to almost everything that could beckon

us forth from our base and there were very few

87

FRANCE

things in the world or places on the globe that
didn t so beckon us; according to which she helped
us along on our expansive course a good deal more,
doubtless, than either she or we always knew.

All of which, you see, is but a manner of making
my point that her name means more than anything
in the world to us but just our own. Only at present
it means ever so much more, almost unspeakably more,
than it has ever done in the past, and I can t help
inviting you to feel with me, for a very few moments,
what the real force of this association to which
we now throb consists of, and why it so moves us.
We enjoy generous emotions because they are
generous, because generosity is a noble passion
and a glow, because we spring with it for the time
above our common pedestrian pace and this
just in proportion as all questions and doubts
about it drop to the ground. But great reasons
never spoil a great sympathy, and to see an in
spiring object in a strong light never made any
such a shade less inspiring. So, therefore, in these

days when our great neighbour and Ally is before

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FRANCE

us in a beauty that is tragic, tragic because menaced
and overdarkened, the closest possible appreciation
of what it is that is thereby in peril for ourselves
and for the world makes the image shine with its
highest brightness at the same time that the cloud
upon it is made more black. When I sound the
depth of my own affection so fondly excited, I
take the like measure for all of us and feel the glad
recognition I meet in thus putting it to you, for
our full illumination, that what happens to France
happens to all that part of ourselves which we
are most proud, and most finely advised, to enlarge
and cultivate and consecrate.

Our heroic friend sums up for us, in other
words, and has always summed up, the life of the
mind and the life of the senses alike, taken together,
in the most irrepressible freedom of either and,
after that fashion, positively lives for us, carries
on experience for us; does it under our tacit and
our at present utterly ungrudging view of her
being formed and endowed and constantly prompted,
toward such doing, on all sorts of sides that are

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FRANCE

simply so many reasons for our standing off,
standing off in a sort of awed intellectual hush or
social suspense, and watching and admiring and
thanking her. She is sole and single in this, that
she takes charge of those of the interests of man
which most dispose him to fraternise with himself,
to pervade all his possibilities and to taste all his
faculties, and in consequence to find and to make
the earth a friendlier, an easier, and especially a
more various sojourn; and the great thing is the
amiability and the authority, intimately combined,
with which she has induced us all to trust her on
this ground. There are matters as to which every
set of people has of course most to trust itself,
most to feel its own genius and its own stoutness
as we are here and all round about us knowing
and abiding by that now as we have never done.
But I verily think there has never been anything
in the world since the most golden aspect of
antiquity at least like the way in which France
has been trusted to gather the rarest and fairest

and sweetest fruits of our so tremendously and

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FRANCE

so mercilessly turned-up garden of life. She has
gardened where the soil of humanity has been
most grateful and the aspect, so to call it, most
toward the sun, and there, at the high and yet
mild and fortunate centre, she has grown the
precious, intimate, the nourishing, finishing things
that she has inexhaustibly scattered abroad. And
if we have all so taken them from her, so expected
them from her as our right, to the point that she
would have seemed positively to fail of a passed
pledge to help us to happiness if she had disappointed
us, this has been because of her treating us to the
impression of genius as no nation since the Greeks
has treated the watching world, and because of
our feeling that genius at that intensity is infallible.
What it has all amounted to, as I say, is that
we have never known otherwise an agent so beauti
fully organised, organised from within, for a mission,
and that such an organisation at free play has
made us really want never to lift a finger to break
the charm. We catch at every turn of our present

long-drawn crisis indeed that portentous name :

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FRANCE

it s displayed to us on a measureless scale that
our Enemy is organised, organised possibly to the
effect of binding us with a spell if anything could
keep us passive. The term has been in a manner,
by that association, compromised and vulgarised :
I say vulgarised because any history of organisa
tion from without and for intended aggression and
self-imposition, however elaborate the thing may
be, shows for merely mechanical and bristling
compared with the condition of being naturally
and functionally endowed and appointed. This
last is the only fair account of the complete and
perfect case that France has shown us and that
civilisation has depended on for half its assurances.
Well, now, we have before us this boundless ex
tension of the case, that, as we have always known
what it was to see the wonderful character I speak
of range through its variety and keep shining
with another and still another light, so in these
days we assist at what we may verily call the
supreme evidence of its incomparable gift for
vivid exhibition. It takes our great Ally, and her

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FRANCE

only, to be as vivid for concentration, for reflection,
for intelligent, inspired contraction of life toward
an end all but smothered in sacrifice, as she has
ever been for the most splendidly wasteful diffusion
and communication; and to give us a view of her
nature and her mind in which, laying down almost
every advantage, every art and every appeal t&it
we have generally known her by, she takes on
energies, forms of collective sincerity, silent eloquence
and selected example that are fresh revelations and
so, bleeding at every pore, while at no time in all
her history so completely erect, makes us feel her
perhaps as never before our incalculable, immortal
France.

THE LONG WARDS

THE LONG WARDS

THERE comes back to me out of the distant past
an impression of the citizen soldier at once in his
collective grouping and in his impaired, his more
or less war-worn state, which was to serve me for
long years as the most intimate vision of him that
my span of life was likely to disclose. This was
a limited affair indeed, I recognise as I try to
recover it, but I mention it because I was to find
at the end of time that I had kept it in reserve,
left it lurking deep down in my sense of things,
however shyly and dimly, however confusedly
even, as a term of comparison, a glimpse of some
thing by the loss of which I should have been the
poorer; such a residuary possession of the spirit,
in fine, as only needed darkness to close round it
a little from without in order to give forth a vague

phosphorescent light. It was early, it must have
W.R. 97 G

THE LONG WARDS

been very early, in our Civil War; yet not so early
but that a large number of those who had answered
President Lincoln s first call for an army had had
time to put in their short period (the first term
was so short then, as was likewise the first number,)
and reappear again in camp, one of those of their
small New England state, under what seemed to
me at the hour, that of a splendid autumn after
noon, the thickest mantle of heroic history. If I
speak of the impression as confused I certainly
justify that mark of it by my failure to be clear
at this moment as to how much they were in
general the worse for wear since they can t have
been exhibited to me, through their waterside
settlement of tents and improvised shanties, in
anything like hospital conditions. However, I
cherish the rich ambiguity, and have always
cherished it, for the sake alone of the general note
exhaled, the thing that has most kept remembrance
unbroken. I carried away from the place the
impression, the one that not only was never to

fade, but was to show itself susceptible of extra-

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THE LONG WARDS

ordinary eventual enrichment. I may not pretend
now to refer it to the more particular sources it
drew upon at that summer s end of 1861, or to say
why my repatriated warriors were, if not somehow
definitely stricken, so largely either lying in ap
parent helplessness or moving about in confessed
languor : it suffices me that I have always thought
of them as expressing themselves at almost every
point in the minor key, and that this has been the
reason of their interest. What I call the note
therefore is the characteristic the most of the essence
and the most inspiring inspiring I mean for con
sideration of the admirable sincerity that we thus
catch in the act : the note of the quite abysmal
softness, the exemplary genius for accommodation,
that forms the alternative aspect, the passive as
distinguished from the active, of the fighting man
whose business is in the first instance formidably
to bristle. This aspect has been produced, I of
course recognise, amid the horrors that the German
powers had, up to a twelvemonth ago, been for
years conspiring to let loose upon the world by

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THE LONG WARDS

such appalling engines and agencies as mankind
had never before dreamed of; but just that is the
lively interest of the fact unfolded to us now on a
scale beside which, and though save indeed for a
single restriction, the whole previous illustration
of history turns pale. Even if I catch but in a
generalising blur that exhibition of the first
American levies as a measure of experience had
stamped and harrowed them, the signally attaching
mark that I refer to is what I most recall; so that
if I didn t fear, for the connection, to appear to
compare the slighter things with the so much
greater, the diminished shadow with the far-
spread substance, I should speak of my small old
scrap of truth, miserably small in contrast with
the immense evidence even then to have been
gathered, but in respect to which latter occasion
didn t come to me, as having contained possibilities
of development that I must have languished well-
nigh during a lifetime to crown it with.

One had during the long interval not lacked
opportunity for a vision of the soldier at peace,

IOO

THE LONG; WARDS

moving to and fro with a professional eye on the
horizon, but not fished out of the bloody welter
and laid down to pant, as we actually see him
among the Allies, almost on the very bank and
within sound and sight of his deepest element.
The effect of many of the elapsing years, the time
in England and France and Italy, had indeed
been to work his collective presence so closely and
familiarly into any human scene pretending to a
full illustration of our most generally approved
conditions that I confess to having missed him
rather distressfully from the picture of things
offered me during a series of months spent not long
ago in a few American cities after years of discon
nection. I can scarce say why I missed him sadly
rather than gladly I might so easily have pre
figured one s delight in his absence; but certain
it is that my almost outraged consciousness of
our practically doing without him amid American
conditions was a revelation of the degree in which
his great imaging, his great reminding and en
hancing function is rooted in the European basis.

10 1

THE LONG WARDS

I felt his non-existence on the American positively
produce a void which nothing else, as a vivifying
substitute, hurried forward to fill; this being
indeed the case with many of the other voids, the
most aching, which left the habituated eye to
cast about as for something to nibble in a state of
dearth. We never know, I think, how much these
wanting elements have to suggest to the pampered
mind till we feel it living in view of the community
from which they have been simplified away. On
these occasions they conspire with the effect of
certain other, certain similar expressions, examples
of social life proceeding as by the serene, the
possibly too serene, process of mere ignorance,
to bring to a head for the fond observer the wonder
of what is supposed to strike, for the projection
of a finished world, the note that they are not
there to strike. However, as I quite grant the
hypothesis of an observer still fond and yet remark
ing the lapse of the purple patch of militarism
but with a joy unclouded, I limit myself to the
merely personal point that the fancy of a particular

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THE LONG WARDS

brooding analyst could so sharply suffer from a
vagueness of privation, something like an un
seasoned observational diet, and then, rather to
his relief, find the mystery cleared up. And the
strict relevancy of the bewilderment I glance at,
moreover, becomes questionable, further, by reason
of my having, with the outbreak of the horrors in
which we are actually steeped, caught myself
staring at the exhibited militarism of the general
British scene not much less ruefully than I could
remember to have stared, a little before, at the
utter American deficit. Which proves after all
that the rigour of the case had begun at a bound
to defy the largest luxury of thought; so that the
presence of the military in the picture on the mere
moderate insular scale struck one as furnishing
a menaced order but in a pitiful and pathetic
degree.

The degree was to alter, however, by swift
shades, just as one s comprehension of the change
grew and grew with it; and thus it was that, to

cut short the record of our steps and stages, we

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THE LONG WARDS

have left immeasurably behind us here the question
of what might or what should have been. That
belonged, with whatever beguiled or amused ways
of looking at it, to the abyss of our past delusion,
a collective state of mind in which it had literally
been possible to certain sophists to argue that,
so far from not having soldiers enough, we had
more than we were likely to know any respectable
public call for. It was in the very fewest weeks
that we replaced a pettifogging consciousness by
the most splendidly liberal, and, having swept
through all the first phases of anxiety and suspense,
found no small part of our measure of the matter
settle down to an almost luxurious study of our
multiplied defenders after the fact, as I may call
it, or in the light of that acquaintance with them
as products supremely tried and tested which I
began by speaking of. We were up to our necks
in this relation before we could turn round, and
what upwards of a year s experience of it has done
in the contributive and enriching way may now

well be imagined. I might feel that my marked

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THE LONG WARDS

generalisation, the main hospital impression, steeps
the case in too strong or too stupid a synthesis,
were it not that to consult my memory, a recollec
tion of countless associative contacts, is to see
the emphasis almost absurdly thrown on my quasi-
paradox. Just so it is of singular interest for the
witnessing mind itself to feel the happy truth
stoutly resist any qualifying hint since I am so
struck with the charm, as I can only call it, of the
tone and temper of the man of action, the creature
appointed to advance and explode and destroy,
and elaborately instructed as to how to do these
things, reduced to helplessness in the innumerable
instances now surrounding us. It doesn t in the
least take the edge from my impression that his
sweet reasonableness, representing the opposite
end of his wondrous scale, is probably the very
oldest story of the touching kind in the world;
so far indeed from my claiming the least originality
for the appealing appearance as it has lately
reached me from so many sides, I find its suggestion
of vast communities, communities of patience

105

THE LONG WARDS

and placidity, acceptance and submission pushed
to the last point, to be just what makes the whole
show most illumination.

Wonderful that, from east to west, they must all
be like this/ one says to oneself in presence of
certain consistencies, certain positive monotonies
of aspect; wonderful that if joy of battle (for
the classic term, in spite of new horrors, seems
clearly still to keep its old sense,) has, to so attested
a pitch, animated these forms, the disconnection
of spirit should be so prompt and complete, should
hand the creature over as by the easiest turn to
the last refinements of accommodation. The
disconnection of the flesh, of physical function
in whatever ravaged area, that may well be measure
less; but how interesting, if the futility of such
praise doesn t too much dishonour the subject,
the exquisite anomaly of the intimate readjustment
of the really more inflamed and exasperated part,
or in other words of the imagination, the captured,
the haunted vision, to life at its most innocent

and most ordered ! To that point one s unvarying

106

THE LONG WARDS

thought of the matter, which yet, though but a
meditation without a conclusion, becomes the
very air in which fond attention spends itself. So
far as commerce of the acceptable, the tentatively
helpful kind goes, one looks for the key to success
then, among the victims, exactly on that ground
of the apprehension pacified and almost, so to call
it, trivialised. The attaching thing becomes thus
one s intercourse with the imagination of the
particular patient subject, the individual himself,
in the measure in which this interest bears us up
and carries us along; which name for the life of
his spirit has to cover, by a considerable stretch,
all the ground. By the stretch of the name, more
over, I am far from meaning any stretch of the
faculty itself which remains for the most part
a considerably contracted or inert force, a force
in fact often so undeveloped as to be insusceptible
of measurement at all, so that one has to resort,
in face of the happy fact that communion still does
hold good, to some other descriptive sign for it.

That sign, however, fortunately presents itself

107

THE LONG WARDS

with inordinate promptitude and fits to its innocent
head with the last perfection the cap, in fact the
very crown, of an office that we can only appraise
as predetermined good nature. We after this
fashion score our very highest on behalf of a con
clusion, I think, in feeling that whether or no the
British warrior s good nature has much range of
fancy, his imagination, whatever there may be
of it, is at least so good-natured as to show absol
utely everything it touches, everything without
exception, even the worst machinations of the
enemy, in that colour. Variety and diversity of
exhibition, in a world virtually divided as now
into hospitals and the preparation of subjects
for them, are, I accordingly conceive, to be looked
for quite away from the question of physical
patience, of the general consent to suffering and
mutilation, and, instead of that, in this connection
of the sort of mind and thought, the sort of moral
attitude, that are born of the sufferer s other
relations; which I like to think of as being different

from country to country, from class to class, and

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THE LONG WARDS

as having their fullest national and circumstantial
play.

It would be of the essence of these remarks,
could I give them within my space all the particular
applications naturally awaiting them, that they
pretend to refer here to the British private soldier
only generalisation about his officers would take
us so considerably further and so much enlarge
our view. The high average of the beauty and
modesty of these, in the stricken state, causes them
to affect me, I frankly confess, as probably the
very flower of the human race. One s apprehension
of Tommy and I scarce know whether more
to dislike the liberty this mode of reference takes
with him, or to incline to retain it for the tender
ness really latent in it is in itself a theme for
fine notation, but it has brought me thus only to
the door of the boundless hospital ward in which,
these many months, I have seen the successive
and the so strangely quiet tides of his presence
ebb and flow, and it stays me there before the

incalculable vista. The perspective stretches away,

109

THE LONG WARDS

in its mild order, after the fashion of a tunnel
boring into the very character of the people, and
so going on for ever never arriving or coming out,
that is, at anything in the nature of a station, a
junction or a terminus. So it draws off through
the infinite of the common personal life, but
planted and bordered, all along its passage, with
the thick-growing flower of the individual illustra
tion, this sometimes vivid enough and sometimes
pathetically pale. The great fact, to my now so
informed vision, is that it undiscourageably con
tinues and that an unceasing repetition of its
testifying particulars seems never either to exhaust
its sense or to satisfy that of the beholder. Its
sense, indeed, if I may so far simplify, is pretty
well always the same, that of the jolly fatalism
above-mentioned, a state of moral hospitality to
the practices of fortune, however outrageous, that
may at times fairly be felt as providing amusement,
providing a new and thereby a refreshing turn of
the personal situation, for the most interested

party. It is true that one may be sometimes

no

THE LONG WARDS

moved to wonder which ^ s the most interested
party, the stricken subject in his numbered bed
or the friendly, the unsated inquirer who has tried
to forearm himself against such a measure of
the criticism of life* as might well be expected
to break upon him from the couch in question,
and who yet, a thousand occasions for it having
been, all round him, inevitably neglected, finds
this ingenious provision quite left on his hands.
He may well ask himself what he is to do with
people who so consistently and so comfortably
content themselves with being being for the most
part incuriously and instinctively admirable that
nothing whatever is left of them for reflection as
distinguished from their own practice; but the
only answer that comes is the reproduction of the
note. He may, in the interest of appreciation,
try the experiment of lending them some scrap
of a complaint or a curse in order that they shall
meet him on congruous ground, the ground of
encouragement to his own participating impulse.

They are imaged, under that possibility, after

in

THE LONG WARDS

the manner of those unfortunates, the very poor,
the victims of a fire or shipwreck, to whom you
have to lend something to wear before they can
come to thank you for helping them. The inmates
of the long wards, however, have no use for any
imputed or derivative sentiments or reasons; they
feel in their own way, they feel a great deal, they
don t at all conceal from you that to have seen
what they have seen is to have seen things horrible
and monstrous but there is no estimate of them
for which they seek to be indebted to you, and
nothing they less invite from you than to show them
that such visions must have poisoned their world.
Their world isn t in the least poisoned; they have
assimilated their experience by a process scarce
at all to be distinguished from their having
healthily got rid of it.

The case thus becomes for you that they consist
wholly of their applied virtue, which is accompanied
with no waste of consciousness whatever. The
virtue may strike you as having been, and as still
being, greater in some examples than in others,

112

THE LONG WARDS

but it has throughout the same sign of differing
at almost no point from a supreme amiability.
How can creatures so amiable, you allow yourself
vaguely to wonder, have welcomed even for five
minutes the stress of carnage? and how can the
stress of carnage, the murderous impulse at the
highest pitch, have left so little distortion of the
moral nature? It has left none at all that one has
at the end of many months been able to discover;
so that perhaps the most steadying and refreshing
effect of intercourse with these hospital friends
is through the almost complete rest from the facing
of generalisations to which it treats you. One
would even like, perhaps, as a stimulus to talk,
more generalisation; but one gets enough of that
out in the world, and one doesn t get there nearly
so much of what one gets in this perspective, the
particular perfect sufficiency of the extraordinary
principle, whatever it is, which makes the practical
answer so supersede any question or any argument
that it seems fairly to have acted by chronic

instinctive anticipation, the habit of freely throwing

113

THE LONG WARDS

the personal weight into any obvious opening.
The personal weight, in its various forms and
degrees, is what lies there with a head on the
pillow and whatever wise bandages thereabout
or elsewhere, and it becomes interesting in itself,
and just in proportion, I think, to its having had
all its history after the fact. All its history is that
of the particular application which has brought
it to the pass at which you find it, and is a stream
round about which you have to press a little hard
to make it flow clear. Then, in many a case, it
does flow, certainly, as clear as one could wish,
and with the strain that it is always somehow
English history and illustrates afresh the English
way of doing things and regarding them, of feeling
and naming them. The sketch extracted is apt
to be least coloured when the prostrate historian,
as I may call him, is an Englishman of the English;
it has more point, though not perhaps more essential
tone, when he is a Scot of the Scots, and has most
when he is an Irishman of the Irish; but there is

absolutely no difference, in the light of race and

114

THE LONG WARDS

save as by inevitable variation from individual
to individual, about the really constant and precious
matter, the attested possession on the part of the
contributor of a free loose undisciplined quantity
of being to contribute.

This is the palpable and ponderable, the admirably
appreciable, residuum as to which if I be asked just
how it is that I pluck the flower of amiability from
the bramble of an individualism so bristling with
accents, I am afraid I can only say that the accents
would seem by the mercy of chance to fall together
in the very sense that permits us to detach the rose
with the fewest scratches. The rose of active
good nature, irreducible, incurable, or in other
words all irreflective, that is the variety which the
individualistic tradition happens, up and down
these islands, to wear upon its ample breast even
it may be with considerable effect of monotony.
There it is, for what it is, and the very simplest
summary of one s poor bedside practice is perhaps
to confess that one has most of all kept one s nose
buried in it. There hangs about the poor

THE LONG WARDS

practitioner by that fact, I profess, an aroma not
doubtless at all mixed or in the least mystical,
but so unpervertedly wholesome that what can I
pronounce it with any sort of conscience but sweet ?
That is the rough, unless I rather say the smooth,
report of it; which covers of course, I hasten to
add, a constant shift of impression within the
happy limits. Did I not, by way of introduction
to these awaiters of acknowledgment, find myself
first of all, early in the autumn, in presence of the
first aligned rows of lacerated Belgians? the
eloquence of whose mere mute expression of their
state, and thereby of their cause, remains to me a
vision unforgettable for ever, and this even though
I may not here stretch my scale to make them,
Flemings of Flanders though they were, fit into
my remarks with the English of the English
and the Scotch of the Scotch. If other witnesses
might indeed here fit in they would decidedly
come nearest, for there were aspects under which
one might almost have taken them simply for

Britons comparatively starved of sport and, to

116

THE LONG WARDS

make up for that, on straighter and homelier terms
with their other senses and appetites. But their
effect, thanks to their being so seated in every
thing that their ripe and rounded temperament
had done for them, was to make their English
entertainers, and their successors in the long wards
especially, seem ever so much more complicated
besides making of what had happened to them
selves, for that matter, an enormity of outrage
beyond all thought and pity. Their fate had cut
into their spirit to a peculiar degree through their
flesh, as if they had had an unusual thickness of
this, so to speak which up to that time had pro
tected while it now but the more exposed and,
collectively, entrapped them; so that the ravaged
and plundered domesticity that one felt in them,
which was mainly what they had to oppose, made
the terms of their exile and their suffering an ex
tension of the possible and the dreadful. But all
that vision is a chapter by itself the essence of
which is perhaps that it has been the privilege of

this placid and sturdy people to show the world

117

THE LONG WARDS

a new shade and measure of the tragic and the
horrific. The first wash of the great Flemish tide
ebbed at any rate from the hospitals creating
moreover the vast needs that were to be so un-
precedentedly met, and the native procession
which has prompted these remarks set steadily
in. I have played too uncertain a light, I am well
aware, not arresting it at half the possible points,
yet with one aspect of the case staring out so
straight as to form the vivid moral that asks to
be drawn. The deepest impression from the sore
human stuff with which such observation deals
is that of its being strong and sound in an extra
ordinary degree for the conditions producing it.
These conditions represent, one feels at the best,
the crude and the waste, the ignored and neglected
state; and under the sense of the small care and
scant provision that have attended such hearty
and happy growths, struggling into life and air
with no furtherance to speak of, the question comes
pressingly home of what a better economy might,

or verily mightn t, result in. If this abundance

118

THE LONG WARDS

all slighted and unencouraged can still comfort
us, what wouldn t it do for us tended and fostered
and cultivated? That is my moral, for I believe
in Culture speaking strictly now of the honest
and of our own congruous kind.

GLASGOW: w. COLLINS SONS AND co. LTD.

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